Still 18 days to go...!

Still 18 looong days before the season 2011 finally starts! There´ll be the final testing session held at Barcelona next week. According to the previous tests the Red Bull and the Ferrari would seem to be the most reliable cars but I´m pretty convinced that we haven´t actually seen the true pace of the RB7 yet! And as far as the new Pirelli tyres are concerned, it´ll be very interesting to see how they´ll work at Melbourne and how many pit stops there´ll actually be during the very first race!

Meantime I find it awesome that there´re drivers like the Finnish Heikki Kovalainen who keeps us fans updated to his life both on track and outside it! I mean everybody (including the F1 drivers) is entitled to his/her private life but I feel kind of out of words trying to describe how much I appreciate Heikki because of what he´s doing! An ordinary person like myself doesn´t often have a chance to actually see the F1 cars live (during the past 17 years which I´ve been following the sport, I´ve only witnessed one GP and one testing session!) so it´s absolutely awesome that Heikki keeps updating his fan page on Facebook daily (and often many times a day) sharing a part of his life with his fans. It gives you a glimpse to the F1 world which you can´t get by reading F1 news on the internet or newspapers. So I want to thank Heikki from the bottom of my heart for that! Heikki´s fans are really privileged in this way because you really can´t take this kind of action for granted. Not every driver is willing to do this... Which is of course completely understandable, not everybody enjoys writing for instance. I respect and admire Heikki for many other reasons, too. Not only he´s a hugely talented and skillful Formula 1 driver but in addition to his F1 career he has interests for things outside F1 and he´s the best possible ambassador for Finland you can possibly imagine.

While waiting for the F1 season to begin I´ve been following the Rally Mexico this weekend. Unfortunately I feel there isn´t much to comment really at the moment. This WRC season seems to go on where the previous season ended... I mean it still seems to be Loeb who is beating everybody else! Though his team-mate Ogier seems to be a stronger opponent this year so he might actually challenge the 7-time world champion... The rally is still going on but I´d guess it´s Loeb who´s going to win, I mean if there won´t be any technical issues. Without the 50 seconds´ penalty Loeb would have taken a sweeping victory! But now at the beginning of the new season it still looks like the Citroens are the ones on top and the Fords are trying to challenge them like last year... It would have been so interesting to see how Kimi would have done in Mexico with the new DS3! But that we´ll never know...

Heikki Kovalainen driving at Circuit de Catalunya on February 18th.